lottery is How Random is Random?
- Thread starter jack
- Start date
How high is the sky?
I'm going to assume you are asking "How random is the lottery?"
I am not one of those who suspects that the methods used by the Lottery managers around the world are anything less than optimal. Some will tell you about the weight of the paint on the balls being higher for 49 than for 1, but I think that is trivial.
In one sense randomness is completely predictable -- over a large sample of draws the numbers will match what is expected in the game. So I guess randomness is constrained, if you will, by the parameters of the game. No matter what happens in the short run, in the long run the averages always win out.
Good luck!
I'm going to assume you are asking "How random is the lottery?"
I am not one of those who suspects that the methods used by the Lottery managers around the world are anything less than optimal. Some will tell you about the weight of the paint on the balls being higher for 49 than for 1, but I think that is trivial.
In one sense randomness is completely predictable -- over a large sample of draws the numbers will match what is expected in the game. So I guess randomness is constrained, if you will, by the parameters of the game. No matter what happens in the short run, in the long run the averages always win out.
Good luck!
I like what Gail Howard says in her book about lotto randomness. And in her software she has a column of expected hits, which would be the number of times a ball should have hit based on the fact that all balls would have an equal chance of hitting so they would all be flat i.e. if truely random each ball would have an equal number of draws. Next to that is the actual history of the ball. Over a large game with thousands of draws the number gets close but there are certainly discrepancies i.e. some numbers have more draws than expected some less, and significant difference when you consider they should be all the same.
and taking a smaller set of draws the difference is even greater. Like I'm currenly working a realatively new game GA Lotto which only has 71 draws. 16 has been hot since the beginning of the game and it draws far more often than any other number where 38 is the complete opposite, it has only 5 draws total. If the game was totally random this wouldn't happen.
And I think that's what all of us are after, finding out the best predictor of that non-randomness of the game so we can exploit an advantage to pick the most probable numbers for any given draw. Finding the right combination of all the factors one can work is the magic key ... when to apply games out, when to apply percentage of change, hot/cold, adjacent number, match numbers, mirrors ... etc.
and taking a smaller set of draws the difference is even greater. Like I'm currenly working a realatively new game GA Lotto which only has 71 draws. 16 has been hot since the beginning of the game and it draws far more often than any other number where 38 is the complete opposite, it has only 5 draws total. If the game was totally random this wouldn't happen.
And I think that's what all of us are after, finding out the best predictor of that non-randomness of the game so we can exploit an advantage to pick the most probable numbers for any given draw. Finding the right combination of all the factors one can work is the magic key ... when to apply games out, when to apply percentage of change, hot/cold, adjacent number, match numbers, mirrors ... etc.